Awake

Shards of daylight 

stab my mind

Impale me on reality 

Soft dark dreams are slipping from memory

Wraiths of tender soot that defy me

Dissolving before me

As my whole heart begs to remember 

Denim dream lover

Who held me, blue satin breath

The underrealm making deals with day

To toss me back to cold hard light

Like a minnow not ready to be eaten by ghosts

Genbaku Dome

at home in Backstab Fortress

annihilation crispies in a bowl of gunpoint milk

batman about to die in the cliffhanger

young no-money in pajamas with feet

reaganomics not trickling down

to my bomb site body of dead meat

my head all forks and knives

the target of ex-allies

a sponge of nails and crustaceans

little Genbaku Dome on a spine

standing in the bunker for forever

finger on my saturday night special

my girl junk in knots for you

my asshole in a sling for you

a sucker for a bottle of cheap revenge

mainlining unalloyed hate of you

take a smoke break while i think

of a denouement for you

hang myself on a noose I crochet for you

praying into my matza and jelly

to help me flower into a killer

not clear on the basic difference

between a pussy and a monk

but in the end the futility of settling our score

mushroomed into an abdominal mass

me drinking to oblivion

in a honolulu cocktail lounge

all the fight drained from my hands

slumped over the memory

of your kind advice to just stay down -

wasting these billion-dollar words on you

depleting their secret energy

when they were always more than weapons

when they had the power all along

as seeds of reconstruction

to rebuild this bashed-in, brokenhearted

sorrow factory of a world

Fairweather Friends

Down and out on 9th and A
ten days sober with a girl that wanted to kiss me
and a lawyer that paid for my shrimps --
I would walk through Tompkins Square
with a bucket of mashed potato in my gut
my hair some kind of archipelago
plastered to my face...
Heather would buzz me into the record company
to peddle my mini muffins
and I'd get a glimpse of the slick boys
she had to grease to make a living.
I heard she relapsed and I'd often wish
I had summoned some kind of compassion libido
to hold her tenderly, her stick figure flesh
subsisting on pizza rinds and diet colas...
I can still see her sunken whole wheat cheekbones
and hear her voice break like sun-streaks
through a junky's drapes...


The lawyer was ex punk rock,
with eyes like chainsawed blue benitoite
fighting down the gems of rage
reformed power breed
fear-jerked by an electric collar -
walking thin, suited and sleek beside me
the mashed potatoes in my belly
poking out in stubby asexual rebellion
and him buying me shrimps to appease
the godless, lawless banshee inside me
that reminded him of his glory wrecking days...


around that time I ran into my Italian
high school sweetheart on 10th and University,
he looked plump and well-fed,
eyes glazed over with the green slumber
and a sad gaze that encapsulated our failure.
He was no longer playing bass, no,
now teaching high school math and let's
leave it at that.
I stumbled away
stunned by the slow atrophy of passion
the way people moved on
like beasts of domestication
all protest corralled offstage...


and then late at night in the evicted penthouse
where i was squatting on a slab of socks in a pillowcase
i put a pen onto a page -
and wrote things i didn't know how to say -


i took a break on the can
and right then there was an earthquake -
the planet bumped me up off my butt
and when i landed i laughed my ass off
just feeling this huge love well up
for everyone who had slept through the adventure

Blue Honeycomb

I draw the bees under my cloak
to strange pains in my ribs
doubled over as the kids call Red Rover
a swarm of yellowjackets
thick in my side
drawn to my dark, sweet matter
like agents of an invisible alchemist
searching for a child bride

this was when the dead boy was still alive
his light blue eyes like blue fireflies
tossing the football into my arms
as we raced between wisps of silver wind
across the snowbanks of Strawberry Fields

we were so happy - happiness of our dirty knees
happiness of our limbs in the gummy grass
and feelings of curiosity -
our bodies these bottlerockets
waiting for a match -- our minds these racehorses
waiting for a gunshot


then friday would roll around
tolling like a knell
I'd plunge my fingers into the paint
feel it taint me, the smell seep into my hair,
wish i could find a bed inside the primal pigments
and never return to the weekend hell

one day i made a run for it.
the touchdowns had gone to my head.
blue fireflies shouted that i could do anything -
that i could play professional football if i tried --
through the back staircase
the dark matter in my groin roaring
with the will to dare -
past reggie jackson's house --
blow a kiss to his legend --
shudder past the red stain on the sidewalk
where the bicyclist crashed
i made it past 79th street,
to the avenue of treasured art --
the sky swirled like a hope kaleidoscope
a thousand watercolors on a sheet of 'what now?'
my shoes were little purple slippers
and one fell off - it confused me-
on the corner staring at the green light
trapped - with all that blue honeycomb in my belly
blue hive of bee ambition

and no money for a cab..

i turned around, my ten years on earth
told me no one would believe me
what demons roamed this earth --
the library closed early, shhhhhh,
keep your private demons to yourself --
and i grew old on that corner --
older than a black oak
my womb shriveling into sour licorice
a croaking, decaying crone at ten
cut from disappointment cloth.

it was 3pm - still a sky of aquamarine
but inside the black curtain fell -
the boy who had outrun us all
who could throw a ball further than the sun
in six short years shot heroin
and me, I put my shoe back on
and limped to the dark sedan
parked outside my school like a hearse

Sandy.

Cast-off, beloved nyc - i watched you burn in 01 and now i watch you drown + feel like i left my heart in your underwater subway womb - would you ever take me back - when there are more tears in me than raindrops

child of gravel and granite, glass, railroad and rubber

born into human hands less human than the starry mica in the pavement

nyc my shepherd of stone and taxihorns

Guardian Alphalt Angel

horizon of hazard lights and fiberglass eyes
briefcases flashing through chinatown stalls
peeks into lives where the other apartment dwellers hide
reading picturebooks at the library that once was a courthouse
salvaged by ee cummings
discarded people in cardboard boxes, minds that fell into gratings
whole lives that fell into sewers
the streets lined with Stradivarius-throated ghosts
crystal iceberged psyches - all memories lost..
a darker night than other cities will ever know
when that other child disappeared
and left me holding up the walls.

groomed in cathedral skylights, clawfood tubs of tap water n' heavy metals

~in central park, in my snowpants ~ sharing my castle with squirrels

there was no other home,

but the kind coldness of the snow and the question-mark art left in mausoleums
a message from another realm "this is a code between me and you. this is our secret
society..."

that's how you raised me + warmed me - and faces on buses told me, like our island, i had an inviolable soul...

some sacred soil underneath the skyscrapers

and the strange green shoots that would split rocks -
are you me? i said to the little iron weed..
you're ugly and beautiful,
like a rainbow in the gutter.

Manhattan my friend,

it takes a typewriter to meet you

now that i live in the sun...

but we will always be blood

us dense and lonely -- crammed and lovely...

crumbling, as the earth reclaims the earth.

The One that Got Away

When I was ten,
I used to drink red wine
with my beautiful black widow,
huddled together in the kitchen
hiding from my dad.
We were in the mountains
smiling at the snow - it looked a lot
like ice cream on a cone.
My spider with her peppercorn smile
and black olives in her teeth.
Biting into bread and apples,
while nursing one of her nosebleeds
that no one could explain.
Her once-black hair now singed with silver
and her shoulders sagging like
dry cleaning in a fancy bag.
Then, like a rush of gold, exploding
all over my body,
her laugh would intoxicate me
shooting soothing poison into my groin.
In a dreamy cranberry haze
I could feel her fingers like
nimble black ropes
shadow roots winding around my torso,
my throat, my mind.
The sticky umbilical spider juice
suction cupping me in place
and her web the warmest,
kindest
kind of deathbed
the kind you believe is meant-to-be.

The Suicides

We went to the club and I waited near the dumpsters
watching Julie talk to the candy-bar boy.
He said, "You should have brought a better-looking friend."

At the door the bouncer pointed to my jug of water
and smirked. I threw it into the bushes.

Inside was a magic pulsar fungus
of bodies, a fecund honey-sweet hive
of the beautiful and the lithe.
Plum fairy lights and cubist strobes
and the anonymous thrum
of sugary teen bait bass lines
the vacuous zero calorie pop
that makes you wish for someone else's life.

A girl called Liz recognized me and smiled
and we started dancing
apart but aligned
like shy, off-season christmas trees
Liz pulling me back from the edge
with her pixie hair and lemonade eyes
the room whirring like a blade
I felt my Great Disgusting Ugliness
standing by to take another beating
but it was off taking a little smoke break,
while I bounced around
to Just What I Needed.
Julie was against the wall making out
but it seemed calculated and cheap
like she was accessorizing
and I was supposed to 'watch and weep'.

The next day Julie called me at the crack hotel
to say Liz had jumped in front of a train.
I just hung up to take the bullet like a man
and swallow my pain.
Then I vomited all over my rented bed
and tried to clean it up with baby wipes.


The first time I saw a boy try to hang himself
was on the lawn of our performing arts high school dorm
he failed
and had to drag his blue-faced corpse through the dining hall
amid the roar of hushed gawks
stares so harsh they carpeted the cafeteria
in a thick blood-purple ooze
the color of the blood that he failed to lose.
Outside the window was a statue
called The Elephant erected in ode
to a girl that had succeeded
in doing it right, and earlier that week
someone had pointed to the words "Help"
gouged into the armrest of a plastic orange chair
with the prongs of a fork, saying "it was her".

Alive

This Chelsea rabbi had a brother
who assembled hats or spun cloth
or had his own yellow pages
I forget,
and his brother had a cousin
who wanted me for a wife
because,
even though I was a half jew
I was still their pretty outlaw
their gem in blue jean rags
with the blue eye lids
full of thin tragic veins.

I told the cousin,
“I have no place to live”
and he gave me his egg salad
and a MetroCard
for the month of August.
We were sweating
when he swore he saw me at a rave
but he was so thick in the pants
from all the potato food we had to eat
to make up for the dead
and their crawling up the wall anguish.

I was only half grateful.
I hated everyone
on an equal basis.

So there was some talk on the telephone,
some mumblings of rabbis and cousins
and these strange men
that cared about my soul
just because somewhere
there was a jewish woman
who was my mother—
they didn’t know her
like I did—
they blanket approved her
into their adorable hot black suit brotherhood
their curly hair small business assembly
they just greenlighted her
based on her ghost.

So down the chain of cousins
came this code, the code to a building
no one lived in
in East New York.
It was next to a bulletproof fried chicken franchise
and a store where you could buy
wheel pasta, discount smokes and pork rinds,
all of which I did buy and consume
as well as Del Monte peas and carrots.
But that comes later.

First I got out a knife
and held it tight through the night
on the spent starry mattress
listening to the gunshots
feeling like
the weakest animal in the kingdom
my body paler than the moon
my eyes sadder than a wound.

There was nothing to do but wait.
I was waiting for section 8
or another rabbi rescue.
I thought it safest in the bathroom.
The tiles were cool.
I let the tiny stones refrigerate me.
I set down the knife by the door
and stayed that way for days.

Then I read the book Alive
straight through without any breaks.
The men clawed through the snow
and ate their friends
and survived and survived and survived.
No one knew what they went through,
and they came home and sat in a fancy restaurant
feeling like frauds
wishing they could crawl through the snow again,
wishing they could feel alive again,
like they did when they almost died.

Once You've Sold Your Love

Once you've sold your love
you see the sweethearts' sunset
as chemicals bleeding through an ulcer in the sky
when they go out for a dinner
you hear the animals in cellophane
screaming in the supermarket aisles
even your heart, your kidney and your lungs
have lost their elegant purpose
they become commodities for paying bills
just in case you lose all other means
and the men, old ones or young,
plumbers, poets, lawyers and fathers
poker players, fishermen, social workers, killers
they wander through the door like minnows in a net
cocks in a barrel, harvested for cash
bellies on a hide-a-bed
once you've sold your love

Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper

I was born the Original Fodder
for Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper
felled by the scythe of a need for love
with an achilles heel heart of amnesia

direct intravenous to dreams and pictures
i tap my psychic gash of fortune
+ ride the vocal diamond catapult
of words that make me more
than a meathooked beast

Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper
with the friendliness and deadliness
of scorpion guardians
their tender strychnine embrace
a high grade dope of one-way caring
beauty with bad aftertaste

but Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper
how can i ever thank you?
for this gift of birth
and the pleasure of my breath?

boys of winter

all through the brisk new jersey winter, we wrote to each other by hand.  his letters came from connecticut where it was even colder. the landlady would slide them under the door of the attic and i would pick them up and lie on my bed for a long time before opening one. you know, just smiling at it.

i was reading the complete works of dostoevsky, living in the attic, practicing the cello for five or six hours a day. once or twice a semester i would give a concert in the university auditorium. i never dared to look at the audience because i was always shaking and pale from vomiting.  i would just stare at the floor. but no matter how nervous i got, that pregnant, squirming to-the-death need to deliver would win and i'd go begrudgingly onstage to have another sonata baby in public.

for the sound of my russian soul weeping through burled cherry wood, the people put their hearts into their hands and applauded with muscle. the sound of clapping would burrow deep into my gut and maybe then i'd look up and see a smile or two. maybe i'd think, i wasn't delivering deformed monsters after all.

the blond chamber director took me aside and stared into my eyes. i had her love, she wanted me to know. and i would fall asleep in my mittens and hat in the freezing attic, feeling the sweet and sour sting of being noticed.

i was 19 at the time and i weighed 98 pounds. i remember, because my mother had come to visit and she commented on how attractive i was in my black velvet pants, hardly anything left of me but bones.

the boy's letter went on for twenty pages. inside the letter was always a little gift, like a sparkly band-aid or a cartoon kitten. he was a painter and so one day to be closer to him, i wanted to make a sculpture. i went out into the snow and gathered the damp limbs of trees. then i took a pocket knife and spent the afternoon whittling the wood into these slender, fluted shafts tied together with twine. I don't know if it was art, but to me it was magical to make something beautiful out of a pile of twigs.

Later that evening i walked in the dark along the railroad tracks to the deli to call the boy from a payphone. He said hello and that he would take the commuter train from new haven all the way to new jersey so we could spend halloween together.

when i got back, the landlady had thrown the sculpture in the trash. it lay in a glad bag landfill of eggshells and orange rinds, looking very much like garbage after all.

a few weeks later, the day came and the bus deposited the boy on the corner in a flannel coat. his stringy blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  he came in and sat on the bed, trying to warm up.

to make it onto the bed, sitting and warming up, it had taken the boy four years of letters and phone calls. it's still hard to understand why anyone would take that kind of time just to travel to new jersey.

we decided to go trick or treating even though he was 22. there was nothing to do in town, but the real reason was something i told him in the letters. he wanted to help me do this hard thing called have fun. this maneuvor of labor, laughing. i hope you will never understand what i mean by that.

i went downstairs and got the tin foil from the cupboard and i covered him from head to toe. he covered me in cellophane and garbage ties. we went around knocking on all the doors with pumpkins in front of them, two too-old mummies in love.

it was around 11p and it was time for him to go home. we sat down on the curb to wait for his bus. earlier at the diner, i saw pieces of his face almost next to mine, parts of his nose and teeth very close to me. i think his woolly hat was on my head. and he fed me something where my mouth was on his finger. every hair that brushed my face was linked to words on a page of a letter, and in his head was every single thing i'd ever said in the dark. other people, like my mom, they only saw a young girl's ass looking tight in velvet pants. but even that, the boy knew about. he knew about it all.

somewhere down the frost crusted street the two yellow eyes of the bus blinked. it was still far away and there was still time. the boy took a deep breath and put his arm around my shoulder. it kind of hung there like a bagette. but after a few seconds of feeling like a breadstick, the arm got heavier and firmer and started to feel like a human embrace. and the arm stayed there for the rest of my life, just resting on my shoulder, loving me and all the words in my head and all the music fighting for its life

Taste Test

I leak blood into your water
that's why you notice me.
Swoon all over me like I'm a celebrity.
You call me unusual, eye me
like a novelty, a disquieting anomaly
can't believe I could have developed
independently, you like to marvel
at my ability to manage the gash
circling around with your
shark cock, camera ready to flash
My smell creeps into your nostrils
and you can't help yourself.
My weakness makes you wet yourself.
You're dressed in pink with rosy cheeks
pinstripes and daisies and feminist icons
wearing women's clothes ironically
maybe you'll put me in your screenplay
you want to be my ally
make a perfume from my tears and my howl
grind my thoughts into a pate for a cracker
collect the little patch of grass
I struggled to grow out of dogshit
styrofoam cups and broken glass
act insulted when I keep a secret
entitled to nakedness by some unspoken pact
separated from me by a chasm shut out
from the exquisite privacy of the dark deep sea
where all us tragedies dive
where all us outcasts bleed

peacocks

i read about this glass house --
she lived in it and he watched.

except for a small trap door
where the man's eyes couldn't penetrate,
she lived exposed-

and in this house she had these peacocks
a showstopping brood - ultramarine and kelly green
dazzling legs on a chorus line -
tin rabbits on a racetrack leading the greyhounds on

she, making these cakes,
full of thick butter and fats,
daily humiliation of having to pee
in a glass gazebo

watched like a hawk.

bought and sold peacock payments
a hostage under a dome
commodity paintings and poems
commodity scales of compliance
on the harp he bought and installed


her legs sliced up like a pie
her art in a vase of fancy feathers
her body -- manipulated flesh dish
and a name like Muffin or Candy
or Cum-on Betty --

but at night the trap door opened
to the ocean and its asylum depths
unbounded imagination reef
a place immune to his obsession
mermen who openly wept
at a fish's death
wild seahorses with electric hearts
making sea anemone mushroom beats

secret sinkholes of moontime living

and one day she did not return -
and these peacocks and their prizes
and all the music of compliance
the supply and demand
of men's eyes - abandoned
a glass wasteland of defection
defied glass ghost town
of forget-my-face

bradass87

Bradley Manning strung up lamb
eat our young
swear allegiance
    to numb as a tank
while the good ol boys
keep the fake peace
we pay for as a nation of sheep

we all were boys who once wept for
wounded birds, i swear we were all once sentient and kind
  but after the beatings and drinking and daily lies
     not every soldier survives

i did
but i'm still bleeding from every hole
staring at the scales
that weigh to kill or to heal

aqua velva

razor blood rained down

from his chin

he kept cutting it up

putting toilet paper

ink blots on the pocks

his shoulder freckles

fell into my hands

like tinsel i couldn't peel

sticking to me against my will

the shower was beating

out the whistling

he did while he worked

rolling rock bottles

sweating green glass drops

the mirror getting fogged up

veiling his laugh

and underneath the laugh,

these mangled mewls

mesmerizing me in place

every hour i shuddered

through the throbs of impalement

blue eyes rotating

like sirens in silence

watching him kill

in the stale, camel-smell air

his pain

having become this fat, waxed weapon

swung my way like a pendulum

that never went back to its side